Jay Fajardo, CEO and Founder of Proudcloud, and co-founder and CTO of MEDIFI

We've come a long way in terms of tech for the past decade, such as the growth of mobile and e-commerce industries. Do you foresee any trends that we should look out for in the near future?

With regards to tech, I guess what you’d be looking at in the next 12 months will be the development and application of machine learning and data analytics. There’s going to be more and more smart apps and artificial intelligence; some people will even be utilizing AI in its various forms to enable their startups and to add more value to their product offering–whether its e-commerce, fintech or even health tech.

The early evidence can be noticed in e-commerce. Whenever shopping online, you will see a lot of the so-called recommendation engines that tries to study your behavior, your personality, your historical behavior on their site or other sites to try to impose to you products and services. These existed for a while; Amazon has employed them for a couple of years already.

We're slowly seeing offline activities being integrated into the digital world, how can this affect the tech industry and potential startups who are considering to be part of it?

Online is decades old. This whole idea of bringing what used to be called brick and mortar activities online is not a new thing. It’s been happening, in fact for a lot of people who were born into the internet, it’s already a normal thing.

What we should notice though is the phenomenon where online is brought back to offline. That’s what’s happening now. For example–for clothes, there’s this brand called Bonobos in the states, wherein you order clothing online, but they actually set up a physical outlet as a place to take up your measurements accurately. There’s a person there taking your measurements, there are clothes you can fit, and Bonobos store your measurements in their database so when you purchase something online, you have the proper measurements. Thus, with this, you end up with a better fitting clothing and you know the quality as well.

Likewise, for food, there’s Good Meal Hunting. A big part of their push is to also expose their kitchen merchants who are online to offline channels like Mercato. So I think that’s the emerging paradigm, where you actually have to try to impute an offline component to your online offering.

How can we humanize online activities granting that a lot of these are done in front of a screen?

That’s exactly what I mentioned in the previous question. People are doing that by bringing online services to offline so that customers can actually touch and feel the product, meet and greet the people behind it, etc.

It’s really tough, but a lot of businesses has already solved it to a certain degree. Before, when e-commerce was new and businesses started selling products online, people were skeptical about it. People would want to see and feel the product. But I guess at present, we’ve breached that whole psychological barrier with the help of solutions that inspires customers to purchase. For instance, the ability to return merchandise. Customers are no longer scared to make the wrong purchase decision because returns have been made easy for them–whatever is the reason. Thus, the behavior of the consumers has just changed, and the power has been brought back to them. Because of all this online market play, the Filipino consumer is much more empowered.

Do you think collaboration will help in the further growth of the tech industry rather than competition? How can this be done?

That concept of collaboration is actually what drove a lot of innovation outside of the Philippines. The whole Open Source Movement was built on that–it’s collaboration. One of the reasons it’s open source is because people are encouraged to contribute to improving the product, whether it’s the software, hardware, or others.

On another hand, locally, for co-working spaces like Launch Garage, the idea really is to encourage entrepreneurs to talk and support each other, share their experiences, recommend different types of strategies, and even share customers; that’s also collaboration.

Collaboration has to happen for innovation to progress faster. If you don’t have collaboration, silos of knowledge are created and the exchange of knowledge is limited.

What are some roadblocks a business-owner can expect when starting his/her own business in this industry?

For one there’s funding—that’s what everybody sees as a roadblock. But I think with the vast resources and knowledge available, it’s way better now than how it was in the early 90s or the late 80s. It’s easier to set up a digital business now because it’s cheaper–you don’t have to set up your own servers anymore.

Here in the Philippines though, a big roadblock will be the availability of engineering talent. We’re hitting a point where there are plenty of people setting up startups and since it’s a global economy, we have local engineers being hired by startups abroad that we’re starting to lose engineering talent.

How do you overcome that? I’ve seen a lot of startup founders who are not engineers or don’t have engineering skills. My suggestion is to learn how to code. The ability to create an app on your own is way easier now than before. By having the knowledge and confidence to manifest ideas into a tangible product, it’s easier to determine the viability of the idea and execute. I’ve seen a lot of startup founders—skilled business people—who have the ability to spot problems and formulate ideas in their head but are challenged when it comes to getting that idea and then creating the actual product, as they don’t have the skills to build it themselves. So my advice really is to learn—whether it’s just a shallow understanding of building it or going in depth and being a real expert coder, at least try.

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